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At first sight the
Netherlands could appear to offer a prime example of the inexorable decline
of Christendom, defined as a tight conglomerate of civilization, territory,
and ideology. As a political entity, the Dutch Republic arose in the wake
of the Reformation. It repeated the Reformations shattering of the unity
of Western Christendom within its own polity. In its own time, the Dutch
Republic was notorious for the licence it accorded dissident religious
groups. In 1599, Antoine LEmpereur, an archtypical Calvinist merchant who
had been living in exile in various German cities since Parma reconquered
his home-town of Antwerp in 1585, moved to Utrecht, in the heart of the
Dutch Republic. He did not like what he saw. Je voy par deca peu de
discipline par la libert trop grande, de maniere que rien ne nous advient
que par un juste jugement de Dieu. His judgement was echoed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. In 1672 a reformed Swiss officer published a pamphlet justifying
his service in the French armies which had invaded the Dutch Republic and
brought it to the verge of ruin. He did so by flatly denying its Christian
character. He pointed out that not a single Swiss reformed city extended
such liberties to Catholics, Jews or Anabaptists as did the Republic. Swiss
cities also took much more care to discipline and regulate the lives of
their citizens. The pamphlet was quoted with approval by ministers of the
Dutch public church.
Quite apart from its tolerant policies, the
Dutch Republic was the hub of the early Enlightenment. The new Dutch
universities Leiden above all, but Franeker and Utrecht as well were
important nodal points of the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters. By
the 1670s, the Dutch Arminians, who had been thrown out of the public
church at the Synod of Dordrecht
(1618-19), had evolved their still basically reformed position of the 1610s into a
prominent example of the early
enlightenment. They had close links with the Cambridge Platonists and John
Locke. Their networks and those of the universities as well were
revitalized after 1685, when the Republic hosted an important segment of
the Huguenot intellectual
diaspora.
Lastly, its example as a virtuous, rich,
tolerant and federal Republic was important for that other Republic, which
emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. The United States saw themselves
prefigured in many ways in the Dutch example. And it can, of course, be
argued that the new settlement of religion in the United States marked the
definite end of medieval Christendom. So a linear interpretation of Dutch
religious history seems to present itself with considerable force. In light
of its origin as a mercantile, Protestant Republic, born from a revolt
against absolutism, its recent toleration of drugs, pornography, abortion
and euthanasia as well as its staggering dechristianisation (more than half
of the Durch now declare themselves to belong to no church at all) causes
no surprise.
The main argument of this paper, however,
will rest upon a rejection of such
a linear interpretation of the Dutch religious past. As I have
argued elsewhere, it is not fruitful to interpret the long-term
development of Dutch religion
as a gradual process during which an overarching social and political
embodiment of Christianity was replaced by a situation in which the
existence of Christian groups depends upon the efforts and commitment of
their members. Instead, various kinds of Christendom have succeeded each other:
the political and social practices by which Dutch Christianity as a social
phenomenon was created and sustained have changed drastically and abruptly
over time. The Dutch Republic and its public church were succeeded by the
Protestant nation of the 19th-century Kingdom of the Netherlands. In the
last quarter of the 19th century, the unity of this nation was shattered by the emergence of
religiously defined subcultures and organizational ghettos which ushered
in the pillarized society of the 20th century. This last
religious-political regime has, in turn, been rapidly dissolving since the
late 1960s.
It is hard, if not impossible, to interpret
these shifts as succeeding declines, leaving Dutch Christendom less
powerful each time. It can be argued,
for instance, that it was only in the first half of the 19th
century, that Christianity achieved an almost total cultural dominance in
the Netherlands. Churches as social organizations were more powerful in the
20th century than they had ever been before.The highest levels of religious
practice seems to have been reached in the late 1950s.
Does this mean that the historical
development of Dutch religion does not lend itself to analysis by means of
long-term developments, because religious changes are more fruitfully
analysed within a time-span of generations? I am rather sympathetic to such
an argument. Yet perhaps it is possible to interpret the shifts in Dutch
history in such a way that they throw some light on developments in other
countries as well.
1.Three variants of Dutch christendom.
All interpretations of long-term religious developments
in the modern world need to discuss the secularization thesis, according to
which the advance of modernisation entails the decline of the social
significance of religion. The thesis is usually presented, for instance by
Steve Bruce, its most eminent living defender, as an amalgam of ideas from
Durkheim, Tnnies and Weber. Social differentiation leads to the emergence of various
independent social spheres, with their own specialists and their own
regularities, which emancipate themselves from ecclesiastical and religious
tutelage. Vergesellschaftlichung leads to a proliferation of impersonal ties and bureaucratic types
of rule, making religion less important for the control of individual
behaviour. Rationalization in
its intellectual and social manifestations lessens the need for appeals to
the supernatural. Bruce
distinguishes two situations in which modernisation does not necessarily
lead to a decline of the social significance of religion. Whenever religion
becomes identified with the defense of a culture, as in the link between
Polish nationalism and Roman-Catholicism, or whenever it offers help during
acute culture transitions, as experienced by rural immigrants moving to
industrial towns and cities, the importance of religion can actually, if
temporarily, increase.
There is much to be said against the
secularization thesis. One wonders whether a theory which possesses so many
ways to defend itself against refutation has any substance at all. Where,
in the modern world, does one not find either cultural defence or cultural
transition? Empirically, the
secularization thesis seems to be refuted by the flowering of organized
religion outside of Europe. Theoretically, the link between the various
aspects of the modernization and religious decline is far from clear.
Social differentiation leads to the emergence of a separate religious
sphere as well, in which the benefits of rationalization and specialization
can be reaped by clergy . All world religions derive their strength it is
almost a matter of definition from their supra-local organisations, not
from their rootedness in local communities. Rationalization has not created
a world in which man is not subject to fate or to powers which he cannot
influence.
Quite apart from these doubts, there is something
strange about the way in which the process of modernization is linked to
the decline of religion. Bruce carefully stresses that the secularisation
thesis is meant to explain the decline of the social relevance of religion,
and that he does not pretend to judge the empirically unverifiable quality
of personal belief. Yet he relates social transformations to religion by
attempting to show that these developments make religious conceptions less
plausible. Religion as a social phenomenon is thought to rest upon
convictions held by individuals. Modernisation makes these convictions less
plausible, eroding the support for religion and, in such a round-about way,
its social significance. It is by influencing the conceptions of individual
believers that modernisation destroys religion as a social phenomenon.
Such an argument implicitly presupposes
that in the past religion derived its
pre-eminent social position from the convictions and endeavours of
its believers. This, however, was not the case. Religious organisation and
the visible social presence of religion were, till quite recently, not the
fruit of voluntarism. As a social phenomenon, religion was part of the
public sphere. It rested upon power, not upon individual, voluntary commitments. The objection
that secularisation is precisely this, a process by which religion is
transformed from being part of the public sphere into a personal
preference, will not do. The explanatory mechanisms of the secularisation
thesis then lose their power. Moreover, such a shift ought to be analysed
in detail instead of being diagnosed as a decline of the social relevance
of religion.
The historian would do well to distinguish
between the empowering aspects of religion and its social location. All
religions can affect people, although the nature of the influence of
religion and its strength vary enormously. All societies locate religion by
means of social and political practices that sustain, create and propagate
religion. Where religion actually is located in rituals, in things or
places, in the order of society or the inner self of moral individuals is
historically contingent.
Both aspects of religion are closely
related. There is a connection between the social location of religion and
how religion affects people, although this connection will seldom be
straightforward and unequivocal. My main point, however, is that the
question of where a society locates religion is logically and empirically
distinct from that of how religion affects people in that society. Even in
a society which locates religion in the inner selves of moral subjects, as
the Netherlands did since the last quarter of the eighteenth century, this
social location is not dependent upon its succes in actually creating such
moral selves.
In the history of the Netherlands, three different social
locations of religion can be distinguished.
1.1 The public church
The Dutch Republic was the unforeseen and
unintended result of a partially successful revolt against the centralizing
policies of the Brussels government of the Habsburg Netherlands. Political and military vicissitudes resulted, by 1580, in the
emergence of a new and independent political entity in the North. The Dutch
Republic introduced the Reformation. The Reformed church, which had organized
itself in the 1550s, and had led an underground existence, became the new
public church.
The Dutch Republics origin in a revolt against
centralizing, absolutist policies resulted in a devolution of effective
power to local elites: the oligarchies of the towns in the heavily
urbanized western part, noble or otherwise powerful rural families elsewhere.
Power was not exercised through central control or by bureaucratic means,
but mostly by patronage at a local level and consensus among elites at a
national level. A second important motive of the Revolt had been opposition
to the Inquisition and religious persecution. The political elites of the
new Republic shared the conviction that no one should be persecuted for his
or her religious convictions. Religion was not used to celebrate political
power. Neither were policies to impose religious uniformity part of a
process of state-building. Local elites did differ, however, in their
toleration of attempts at religious organization by dissenters. The Reformed
church considered its new role as public church to be its proper status.
Yet the Reformed also aspired to be a community of true believers and did
not wish to become coextensive with society. Both civil and spiritual
authorities thus refused to gather all subjects of the Republic into a
single national church.
This led to a situation which differed
markedly from religious settlements elsewhere. The public church of the
Dutch Republic had a monopoly on public expressions of religion. It was
supported by the state, and its ministers, synods and buildings were
financed from public funds. Public office could only be held by those who
were not members of another religious group. On the other hand, there were
no laws forcing people to attend the services of the public church or even
to take part in its rituals. Marriages could legitimately be contracted
before the civil magistrate. Baptism was not obligatory, although it seems
to have been generally sought. With some misgivings, the church generally
baptized all children offered. It accepted as full members only those who
were willing to make a public confession of their faith and to submit to
its discipline.
In the provinces of Holland and Utrecht and
in part of Friesland, from a very early date, the authorities allowed the rebuilding of a certain
kind of Catholic organization. Here, too, the Mennonites, the peaceful
successors to the violent Anabaptists of the 1530s, found most of
their adherents. Here, too, the Reformed church, in various conflicts
concerning its confession and public status, formulated its identity
most clearly. This is the
region people think of when they talk about the tolerant Dutch Republic.
From the very beginning, the civil
authorities in this area took an interest in the religious organisations of
the Protestant dissenters and the Catholics. They not only suppressed their
encroachments upon the public sphere, but also interfered with their
internal workings. By the last quarter of the 17th century, a more or less stable
religious structure had sprung into being, the result of a religious
policy, which was aimed at stabilizing the religious order and the
relations between different religious groups. The implementation of these
policies was always in the hands of local authorities, but their measures
show marked similarities. First, local authorities took care to strengthen
the position of the laity in all churches. In all different religious
groups in the Republic, among Jews and Lutherans, as among Mennonites and
Reformed, the clergy was not involved in the financial administration nor
was it allowed to decide on the allocation of money. Secondly, local
authorities always had to approve the appointments of new clergymen of all
churches. Thirdly, local authorities oversaw the internal affairs of each
religious group and upheld the authority of its leadership, although only
for as long as the requirements it imposed on its adherents remained within
the bounds of a common morality.
This close involvement of the public
authorities with the social manifestation of religion, implied a
certain recognition of all churches as legitimate parts of the social and
religious order. It is, in fact, very difficult to distinguish between
recognition of a church and the involvement of public authority in its
internal affairs. Public authority was most deeply involved in the running
of the public, reformed church, and the growing recognition of Catholicism
as a legitimate part of the religious landscape, for instance, can be monitored
by the number of measures taken by public authority to influence its
internal working. Recognition resulted in an hierarchical ordering of the
different groups. This ordering took place along different lines.
Officially, the most important distinction was the difference between the
public church and all others. The Reformed church had a monopoly on the
public exercise of religion. Nationality could mitigate this principle.
Religious groups which were considered to be of a different nation, like
the Lutherans (who were mostly German immigrants) and the Jews were
allowed a public presence. No one could mistake the Jewish synagogues
or Lutheran churches in Amsterdam for private buildings. Autochthonous
Dutch dissident groups, like the Arminians, Mennonites or Catholics
were never allowed to present themselves so publicly.
More important in the long run was the
gradual hierarchical ordering of the social position of the adherents
of the different religious groups. Along with the growth of a religious
order of which all churches were considered legitimate parts, Protestant
dissenters and Catholics were excluded from a growing number of social and
political positions. Religious toleration entailed social discrimination.
In the 1620s, a Catholic stonemason working for the city would occasionally
be harassed by the authorities while attending a Catholic service. In the 18th century, Catholic
services were no longer disturbed, but Catholics were consistently passed
over for public positions. Over time, an order came into being, ultimately
underwritten by political authority, which organized Dutch society along
religious lines.
Their religious policy was an
important element of the responsibilities of the civil authorities, part of
their upholding of civil order. This civil order, even it was not based on
the stark authoritarianism of a centralized, absolutist state, was still
clearly hierarchical in nature. Over time, social distinctions within the
Dutch Republic hardened. The oligarchisation of the political elite, the
so-called regenten, was only the most manifest
aspect of this tendency. The political and social practices of the Dutch
Republic localised religion in a visible, hierarchical social order. The
public church recognized these practices as Christian, basing itself on an
essentially Augustinian view on the relation between political power and
religion. The public upholding of true religion was supposed to precede
private piety. Sermons preached at annual public days of prayer, the
most important civic ritual of the Republic, almost invariably ended with
an overview of the duties of the bearers of authority in society:
magistrates, ministers, church councils, parents and employers. Although
the theologians of the public Church of the Republic carefully
distinguished between political and ecclesiastical authority and always
upheld the theoretical independence of the latter, they conceived of
society as a body informed by both. This conception tied in rather well
with the extremely decentralized and differentiated nature of the body
politic of the Republic. Since the Republic was imagined as a whole of
interlocking hierarchical elements, provincial and local differences in the
details of the political and ecclesiastical order were not considered to be
of great importance. The same held for the presence of dissenters and
Catholics. Provided they did not encroach upon the visible and public
religious order, their existence did not call into question the view of
society upheld by the public church. Their encroachments upon public space,
in the form of church buildings or blatantly anti-reformed polemics were
decried, not their presence or resistance to incorporation within the
public Church. Conflicts between ministers and civil authorities about the way
the latter exercised their powers always took this shared frame of
reference for granted.
Dissenters and Catholics resisted their
incorporation in this social hierarchy by probing the limits to which they
were subjected. Such endeavours lessened in the 18th century, as the religious
order became more and more stabilized. All religious groups started to take
part in the annual public days of prayer, which became in a certain way the
main ritual of a civil religion. Eschatological hopes about a sudden,
miraculous reversal of the political order were entertained by at least
part of the Catholic community. Some Catholics, especially those in the areas in the south of the
Republic, with their almost homogenous Catholic population, pointedly
refused to take part in the days of prayer. Catholics in Holland and
Utrecht seem to have had no problem with being involved with this
religio-political civil ritual.
1.2 The protestant nation
The invasion of French armies in 1795 made possible
the fulfillment of an indigenous revolution, which had been aborted some
years earlier. The revolution brought an end to the political fragmentation which
had characterized the Dutch ancien rgime. Since then, the Netherlands have
been a centralized state with a strong bureaucratic government. The
revolution also destroyed the old religious and social order. One of the
first important acts of the revolutionary government was to separate church
and state. The new nation-state would know only citizens, not various
corporate religious groups. It would be a moral community, based on
equality before the law rather than on a hierarchical order. The granting
of full civil rights to the Jews was something of a test-case for this
policy. The new Kingdom of the Netherlands, established in 1815 after the
final defeat of Napoleon, incorporated the former Austrian
Netherlands, present-day Belgium. It inherited both the ideal of the nation
and the effective central bureaucracy of its revolutionary predecessors and
continued their centralizing policies. Both the former public church and
Old Dissent (a term which is not used in Dutch church history but which I
find useful, for reasons which will become apparent, to characterize the
Mennonites, Arminians and Lutherans), received effective
organizational structures from the central authorities. Henceforth,
they would be dependent not on local elites, but on the central government,
as mediated by strong ecclesiastical organizations, staffed by members of
the clergy. The remuneration of all Protestant ministers was regulated by
the central government as well. The ideological differences
between the Protestants were reduced. Apart from the most traditional
Mennonites, all Protestant clergy were trained at institutes of higher
learning along more or less the same lines. The effect of these measures
was to strengthen enormously the position of the Protestant clergy. In
fact, the former public church together with Old Dissent became an
informal national establishment, with the task to further the identity of
the Dutch nation by teaching and civilizing the common people.
The public role of religion was enhanced.
The state took religion very seriously. The new effectiveness of all
ecclesiastical organizations was the result of political measures and
reforms. Protestantism was deeply interwined with the new nationalism of
the nineteenth century and succeeded in giving it a Christian, even
Protestant character. Literary culture, for what it was worth, was to a
large extent shaped by Protestant ministers and infused with
Christianity. The flood of print culture produced in these years bore a
marked religious character, as did the new primary school system.
In effect, the cultural, social and
political practices of the new nation-state located religion in the inner
selves of the citizens of the nation.
As had been the case with the location of religion during the
Republic, organized religion justified these practices, now with an appeal
to the supposedly individual and liberal nature of Protestantism. All
Protestant churches considered the Netherlands a nation made up of
individuals, and saw their own churches as means to further the welfare of
this nation by morally educating its citizens. Even those who opposed aspects of the religious policies
of the new kingdom accepted the nation as the ultimate moral community.
Members of the Dutch Rveil, like the minister Schotsman or the layman
Groen van Prinsterer, did not wish to re-establish the hierarchical
ordering of various religous groups which had characterized the Republic.
They wanted to determine the character of the nation. In this, they were
actually very close to their enlightened opponents.
It is also clear that the various practices
entailed by the new location of religion did not, in fact, succeed in
creating a homogeneous nation of equal moral citizens. On the contrary, the
new location resulted in various ways in exclusions and led to resistances.
The assimilation of Catholics proved to be the most formidable problem. From
very early on, already in the years immediately following 1795, the
nation of moral citizens was very much considered to be Protestant. After
the separation of church and state, conflicts about the redistribution of
resources between the various churches led to some vicious clashes between
Catholics and Reformed, especially in the area south of the Rhine, where
the small Protestant elite developed virulent anti-Catholic sentiments. Attempts by the
central government to make the Roman Catholic church of the former Austrian
Netherlands into an institution devoted to nation-building, along the lines
of its reorganisation of the former public church of the Dutch Republic,
led to the revolt of Belgium in 1830. After the formal
separation of Belgium from the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the late
1830s, it became much easier to identify the remaining Northern
Netherlands with a general Protestantism. The Dutch Catholics living in the
religiously mixed areas north of the great rivers were not considered to
affect the homogeneity of the nation state. Only the areas south of the
rivers, with their overwhelming Catholic majorities, were considered a
problem. Various anti-Catholic
organizations sprung up in the 1840s to strenghthen the Protestant presence
there.
Among the Protestants, the new location of
religion led to a very strong process of cultural class-formation. The
emphasis the new practices put upon education and understanding, style and
manners, created an enormous difference between the civilised elite and the
rude, uncivilised people. When reading through the outcrop of new manuals
for the ministry which emerged in the years around 1800, one is struck how
all these manuals take for granted the existence of an enormous cultural
difference between the minister and his parishioners. He has to transform
them to in order to elevate them to his own moral and cultural level. The
minister is a parent, while his parishioners are children. This cultural
difference between the elite and the common people played an important role
in political life as well. True involvement with the nation was reserved
for those who were truly civilised.
This new stress upon civilisation and
education as marks of social difference led to forms of resistance which
focused upon knowledge. In the first half of the nineteenth century small
groups of lower-class people left the former public church in a steady
trickle to set up churches that presented themselves as orthodox Calvinist,
as preservers of a knowledge that had been forgotten by their social
superiors. I will call them New Dissent. They were persecuted and harassed
by the government. Even so, between 1834 and 1889 they grew to 4.2 % of the
population.
1.3 The pillarized society
The unity of this Protestant nation was
shattered in the period between 1870 and 1920. Orthodox-Protestants,
Catholics and Socialists created their own organizational worlds. What came
into being was the pillarization of Dutch society. The particular nature of this system did not consist in the
emergence of more or less closed organizational worlds. After all, in these
years Catholic and Socialist ghettos emerged in other countries as well.
The originality of the Dutch pillarization is to be found in the way in
which these mobilizations were successful in contesting the Protestant nature of the nation and
actually succeeded in eclipsing the notion of the nation as the supreme
moral community. Ideologically, the ghettos took over the nation. They did
so in a literal sense as well. The pacification of 1917 which ended the
political struggles between liberals and confessional parties was in
reality a clear-cut confessional victory. The pacification rested upon the
introduction of universal suffrage and the financial equal treatment of
public schools on the one hand, and private Catholic and orthodox
Protestant schools on the other. The introduction of universal suffrage
introduced a period of more than half a century in which Christian
political parties polled more than half of the vote. The financial
subsidies of Christian private schools (which were soon attended by more
than half of Dutch children) were followed by similar subsidies of social
and cultural Christian organisations. Over time, the subsidies became ever
more generous. The greatest victory of the pillarized system was the way in
which the public broadcasting system in the Netherlands was set up. Both in
the case of radio, as well as later with television, a public broadcasting
organisation was lacking. Radio and television time was divided between
various private organisations, subsidised by the state.
In social life as well, religious identities became more
and more important. Journals bore a marked confessional character. There
were relatively strong Christian labour unions. With small businesses and
shopkeepers, and especially with farmers the confessional organizational
drive was particularly succesful, less so with big business. It is from the agricultural sector
that the usual example of the absurdities to which this system could lead
is taken: the famous co-existence of a Calvinist and Roman-Catholic
Goat-Breeders Association. Such organizations actually did exist. Leisure
and sports were to a large extent confessionally divided as well. Playing
table-tennis in Leiden and taking part in the local competition is even
today tantamount to a crash course in religious geography:
organizationally, table tennis is limited to those parts of the countryside
around Leiden which have been Catholic since the 16th century. The various confessional
organizations in the social, cultural, economic, educational and religious
spheres were linked by means of many personal contacts.
So, during the better part of the 20th
century in the Netherlands, religion was probably a more important aspect of
social identity than class or region. The different pillars succeeded in
holding in check their internal tendencies towards fission, but only by
means of emphatically stressing their seperateness. The Dutch nation was no
longer thought to be composed of individuals. It consisted of different
groups, which best served the national interest by preserving their own
distinctive character. The various social and political practices of the
pillarized society still located
religion in inner selves, but these selves were always considered as
members of a distinct group within the nation. What happened in effect was
an ethnicization of religion. Religious identity involved membership of a
group, and vice versa. In origin, the various pillarized groups were the result
of religious and political mobilization. They bore a truly popular
character. Yet in their established versions, the various pillars wielded
vast power.
There was always resistance towards the
movement towards pillarization. Even those who joined the mobilizing drives
which made up the dynamic aspect of pillarisation did not follow all the
injunctions laid upon them by the clerical and political leaders of the
movements. Principal opponents were mainly to be found among the liberal and
Protestant elite. Theirs was a lost battle. After 1917, even those who
desperately wanted to be considered representatives of the common weal were
forced to conceive of themselves as a particular group.
2. Causes and factors of the shifts between
the various regimes.
From the brief sketch of the various
locations of religion in the Dutch past it is immediately clear that the
shifts between them were closely linked to political events. In this
section I will go into the mechanisms of these shifts.
2.1 The end of the public church
All explanations of the end of the
religious order of the Dutch Republic must start with political events,
because the demise of the public church was closely linked to the
Revolution. In August 1796 extensive discussions took place in the new
National Assembly about the separation of church and state. During these
debates, it was quickly pointed out and agreed upon that the official
adoption of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity in 1795,
immediately in the wake of the French invasion, had formally opened
political and public office to dissenters and catholics. The subsequent
discussions centered on the myriad ways in which the public church and its
institutions were still interwoven with local government. The main issue
was a just distribution of resources, both in the form of money and
church-buildings, among the different religious groups. Some deputees
argued for an equal support of all churches by the state; others wished to
end all financial support of organized religion.
Only a few deputees adopted radical
enlightened standpoints. They argued that in the past the collusion between
clergy and regents had resulted in despotism, tyranny, and bigotry. But
even these most radical voices argued that the separation of church and
state would result in a liberation of true piety. The whole of the National Assembly agreed upon the
social relevance of religion. The events of 1795 did not result in an
abrupt shift, suddenly opposing the public church to the revolution. There
were some ministers of the former public church who refused to swear an
oath to the new constitution and were consequently deposed. Other ministers
were very much in favour of the revolution and served the revolutionary
government, even in high administrative posts. The differences between
these ministers were understood and defined as political. There was no
opposition of religion or a confession to the Revolution. Moreover, it is difficult to claim that the
former public church was oppressed during these revolutionary years. For
some years, between 1798 and 1801, it looked as if it would lose all
financial support of the government. Recent research has shown that it
reacted rather vigorously to this threat, and developed all kinds of local
initiatives to raise money. In the end it proved unnecessary to implement these plans. Yet they were only a
part of the new activities the church embarked upon in these years. In 1796
a missionary society was founded. Various new liturgical initiatives were undertaken, with as most
prominent result the
introduction of a new hymn-book in 1806: till then only psalms had been
sung during church-services. Church law was codified, the lower organisational level of the
church showed a new energy, there was a whole new interest in the efficacy
of the ministry, and a vibrant
religious press emerged, catering to the needs of an interested laity. All
in all, and in marked contrast to the existing church-historical
literature, I would not hesitate to speak of a religious revival.
Most of these new initiatives of the church
were linked in one way or another with developments in the second half of
the 18th century. A new
version of the Psalter had been adopted in 1776. A spectatorial press, aimed at moralizing and civilising the citizen had been
in existence since the 1740s, and a lively societal movement had emerged in
the 1770s. Protestant Dissenters played a role in these movements which was
of much greater weight than their small numbers warranted. Most of these
18th-century initiatives bore a marked moralistic character and were imbued
with religion, yet they had not been clerically inspired or under
ecclesiastical control. The Dutch Republics loss of great power status, caused
by its economic difficulties, was interpreted in moral terms as a loss of
ancestral virtue and led to proposals for educational and moral reform,
meant to restore a virtuous citizenry.
So how is this link between the enlightened sociability
of the late 18th century and the religious revival of the early 19th
century to be understood? The simplest way is to start from the observation
that in the 18th century religion in its organized form was part of the
political and public order. The public church had fiercely combated the
Moravians and domesticated the Dutch versions of the mid-18th century
revivalistic impulse which rocked the Protestant Atlantic world. Its close relation with, and control by, the civil authorities
simply left no room for new initiatives. New religious impulses could only
develop in new social spaces, such as those provided by the societal
movement. The separation of church and state in the wake of the
revolutionary happenings of the 1790s was not only a liberation of
religion, but of the church as well.
So the shift in the location of religion is not
only to be explained by the political events in the wake of 1795, but also
by the fact that the cultural nationalism of the societal movement had become
dominant within the church as well.
This had happened by the end of the 1770s. Various reasons can be
adduced to account for its sudden and total victory. Various shades of
pietism had steadily been gaining influence within the public church during
the 18th century. Their stress on individual piety fitted in rather well
with the attempt on the part of the societal movement to create moral
citizens. The pietistic depiction of the truly converted present in the Republic as the core
of the church prepared the creation of the imagined community of the nation. The eighteenth
century religious order tended to have a similar effect. The logic of the
religious policies of the civil authorities was explained in sermons
preached during the annual public days of prayer, organized by civil
authority and observed by all religious groups. These sermons upheld what
is best called a civil religion, and which found the reason for the welfare
of the Republic not in the presence of particular religious groups or confessions,
but in its tolerant religious order, which made possible the exercise of
individual virtue and piety.
A final reason for the general adoption of
the new cultural nationalism by the public church has to do with social
history. The societal movement was very much an upper-class and
upper-middle-class-affair. Contemporary novels, as for instance Willem
Leevend by Aagje Wolff en Betje Deken, depict a
social world in which the people emerge in the person of a captain of an
East-India-man, speaking with an accent and without culture. People lower
on the social scale have dropped out of sight. Ministers, both of the
public church and of Dissent, on the other hand, are highly conspicious
(Willem Leevend is a theology student). This close link between the
ministry and the social and cultural elite was a new phenomenon. In the
last quarter of the eighteenth century the clergy of the Dutch public
church became a nationally and socially homogeneous profession. For the
first time, ministers regularly changed livings, moving throughout the
entire country. In terms of
social class, the clergy became much more homogeneous as well. Recruitment
among lower social groups declined. During the whole period of the Dutch ancien
regime, a large clerical proletariat had existed,
made up of students who had finished their training for the ministry but
had not yet received a calling. In the last decades of the eighteenth
century ministers developed a sense of their collective standing in the
nation, and became convinced that the behavior and culture of even the
lowest members of their body would reflect upon the reputation of the
entire profession. By making it more difficult to enter the clergy, the
ministers drastically altered the social composition of their profession. In
this way a traditional ministry, which in most aspects had resembled the
clerical estate of other early modern European societies, was at the end of
the eighteenth century transformed into a nationally and socially
homogeneous profession.
It is, in short, the formation, in the last
half of the 18th century, of a new, homogenuous, cultural and social elite,
broader than the traditional political class of regents, but still
relatively tiny in numbers, which is the central factor that explains the
shift in the location of religion. The formation of this new elite took
place by means of the enlightened sociability and its print culture. Within
this cultural movement, dissenters, both Mennonites and Arminians, could
play an extraordinarily important role, because they had, for reasons which
need not detain us here, in the course of the 18th century become
upper-middle-class groups . Some numbers are perhaps in order. At the end
of the 18th century, the Dutch Republic had about two million inhabitants:
55% of them belonged to the public church, 38% were Catholics, 7% were Jews
and Protestant Dissenters, mainly Lutherans. There were some 4000 Arminians
(a tiny 0,2%) and 30.000 Mennonites (1,5%). It has been estimated that at
the end of the Republic, there were about 2000 regenten and some 1500 ministers of the public church. The newly formated
cultural elite, the consumers of the new cultural nationalism, consisted of
about 20.000 people.
2.2 Shattering the protestant nation
The Protestant nation of the Dutch liberal elite was
destroyed by the emergence of mass-politics in the last quarter of the 19th
century. This, as such, is no surprise. Neither is the role the political
organizations of Catholics and Socialists played in this development.
Peculiar to the Netherlands is, however, the importance of
orthodox-protestant political parties. This importance is two-fold. In the
first place, orthodox-protestants introduced modern party-politics into the
Netherlands. In the second place,
by forming an alliance with the Catholics they prepared the way for a
dominance of christian-democratic parties which made pillarization possible
and which only ended in the mid-1970s .
In searching for explanations of this
phenomenon its economic preconditions ought to be pointed out first. During
most of the 19th century the Netherlands possessed a highly developed
market-economy, yet industrial development was slow. There was no large industrial proletariat, from which the
socialists could recruit. Early Socialism found its first mass-basis among
rural labourers in Friesland and Groningen, the two most northern
provinces. By the time large-scale industry developed, Catholics and
orthodox Protestants already had their organizations, including
trade-unions, in place and they succeeded in retaining the loyalty of large
sections of the working class. There is no clear geographical correlation
between Socialist strongholds and industrial developments. The textile
industry in Catholic Twente, in the east, fostered a strong Catholic union,
as did the mining area in Limburg, in the South. The industrial areas along
the rivers north and east of Dordrecht would develop into an
orthodox-protestant bulwark.
Politically, orthodox Protestantism sprang
from the Dutch Rveil. This revival movement was, even measured by the
standards of the Dutch social and political elite, an aristocratic and
elitist movement. Its members moved towards politics only slowly and
hesitatingly, mainly around the issue of education. In 1848 a new, liberal
constitution had been introduced in the Netherlands. Some members of the
Rveil were members of the new Parliament, yet they did not form a party or
closely-knit group. In the fundamental discussions of the late 1850s about
the place of religion in the public, primary schools members of the Rveil
found themselves on opposing sides. The political movement of orthodox
Protestants was only boosted when in the 1860s and 1870s Dutch
Protestantism polarized both ecclesiastically and theologically. Especially after 1867, when in
consequence of the constitution of 1848 church councils became
elective, all male members not
receiving poor-relief having the vote, organization became important. These
ecclesiastical struggles between liberal and orthodox Protestants
reinforced the political conflict between liberals and orthodox
Protestants.
In the 1870s a new generation of political
leaders in these battles stumbled upon the possibility of appealing to the
people, not only to those who had the vote, but also to those who did not.
Various organizational models were tried out, for instance an alliance
against the law on public education which was modelled on the Anti Corn Law
League. Experiments with
various mobilizing tactics were engaged upon. At a local level ministers of
New Dissent were very active as organizers. In the summer of 1878 a hugely
succesfull petition against radical Liberal legislation making it difficult
to set up confessional
schoools gathered 300.000
signatures. In these years no more than a 100.000 people had the vote. The
organisation of the petition, with a strong central executive directing the
activities of local comittees was quite modern. In 1879 a political party was organized along the same
lines, binding deputees to a party program. In the 1880s the political
leader of the orthodox protestants would experiment with various political issues to
mobilize the people, for instance supporting the Boers in their resistance
against the English, ending the possibility of replacement in the draft for
the army, and defending rights of the new working class. In the elections
in 1886, after the first substantial broadening of the census since 1848,
(the electorate doubled), the orthodox-protestants gained 28 of the 100
seats in Parliament. Together with the Catholics, they could form a
government.
The obvious question to pose is amongst
which social groups this political movement had success. This is rather
hard to answer. Their strength lay mainly in the middle-class of artisans,
shopkeepers and tradesmen. But members of the political and cultural elite
played an important role within the party, and they also had substantial
working-class support. The orthodox protestant trade union, Patrimonium,
was in the 1870s and 1880s during some years a more important mobilizing
organisation than the political party itself. This wide class-appeal is
coupled with a marked geographical pattern. Orthodox protestantism was
strong in only some areas: the southern and eastern country side of
Zuid-Holland, Utrecht, the northern parts of Gelderland, the north-western
part of Overijssel, the south-western and north-eastern part of Friesland.
These areas do not bear similar economic characteristics, so it is hard to
explain the appeal of the protestant political movement in economic
terms. It is clear that the
movement was particularly successful in areas where there was already some
kind of pre-existing organisational life among the common people. Ministers
of New Dissent could furnish such an infra-structure, but in Friesland various
cultural organisations seem to have played a similar role, laying the
ground for the success of both early Socialist and orthodox Protestant
mobilisations.
An explanation of the geographical
differentiation of the success of the orthodox-protestant movement by means
of religious history does not work: the modern geographical pattern of
orthodox-Protestantism does not correspond to the movement of ministers
between parishes in earlier times.
By default then, the best explanation of
the appeal and success of the orthodox-protestant movement seems to lie in
its mobilizing aspect. The specific form it took, of opposing the religious
values and the educational drive of the liberal state by its claim to have
preserved a traditional truth and the wish for special schools, seems to
derive from the values and practices of the Protestant nation, which had
made religious knowledge the basis of a cultural class-formation. Early Socialism too, bore a
marked religious aspect, with its first great leader, the Anarchist Domela
Nieuwenhuis, revered as Our
redeemer by the rural proletariat of the North.
2.3 The end of pillarization
The strength of pillarisation emerged most
impressively after the ravages of World War II. The Germans had dismantled
most of the pillarized organisations, and the Resistance and the Queen had
hoped for a drastic
reorientation of Dutch politics. The Socialist Party, in uneasy alliance
with groups within the former public church and some liberals, tried to
reorganize itself as a general party of progress, even changing its
German-sounding name of SDAP to PvdA, which was a direct translation of the
name of the British Labour Party. Yet the confessional parties and
organizations reasserted themselves without too much trouble and won absolute
majorities till the late 1960s. The percentage of children in confessional
schools reached an all-time high in the 1950s. Then this whole world
collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the organizations which made up
the orthodox Protestant and Catholic pillars have ceased to stress their
distinctive confessional identity or have shed it altogether. The
Catholic and Socialist trade-unions fused. Confessional journals
disappeared.
It is only possible to offer tentative
explanations for this sudden shift. It is clearly connected with the
cultural revolution of the 1960s. Although the mobilizing movements of
orthodox Protestants and Catholics were genuinely popular, they were also
highly authoritarian and moralistic. The 1960s revolt against strict morals,
traditional gender roles, and patriarchal forms of authority dissolved
the popular endorsement of such a regime. Moreover, the very successes
of the mobilizing movements had firmly integrated their adherents in the
state and national life, rendering an oppositional stance less and less
plausible. Already by the late 1950s, Catholic intellectuals, both lay and
clerical, entertained doubts about the value of the closed character of the
Catholic movement. Neo-Calvinist theologians in the late 1960s and 1970s slowly
undermined the formulation of a strict Calvinist orthodoxy, which for
almost a hundred years had been the ideological justification for the
separate existence of their church. The highly articulated structures of both the Catholic and the neo-Calvinist
churches assured that the self-doubt felt by their leading intellectuals
would spread rapidly among their rank and file.
Further important factors seem to have been
the enormous expansion of the welfare state, which considerably lessened
the grip of the pillars on their members, and the emergence of an almost
complete moral consensus within the Dutch nation since the 1960s, both
leading to a rejection of organizational and symbolical expressions of the
existence of different moral communities. Within one generation, the
nation has become once more the ultimate moral community of the Dutch. In
September 1994, for the first time in almost eighty years, a cabinet was
formed without either Catholics or orthodox Protestants, after general
elections in which both they and the Socialists had suffered the greatest
losses in their history. Although the prime minister is still a Socialist,
the majority of the cabinet consists of liberals. Yet the cabinet has taken
all conceivable measures to ensure that this exclusion of the Christian
Democrats does not bear any ideological overtones. At the religious service
at the beginning of the parliamentary year, more than half the cabinet
was present, including a number of ministers who had not attended a church
for years, if ever. All divisive symbolic gestures are carefully avoided.
3. Popular involvement and missionary
strategies.
3.1
Not very much is known about the involvement of the laity during the
ancien rgime, or about the missionary
strategies undertaken by the various religious groups in the Dutch
Republic. The impression one gets is that Dissenters and Catholics were
much more aggressive than the public church, using laymen and laywomen and
working along lines of family, neighbourhood and work. The public church
was more or less content with enjoying its recognized status and its public
preaching. When it did start to enjoy considerable popular support, in the
course of the 17th century, it
started to worry about the quality of its members and placed greater
emphasis on educational requirements. The main role in stabilizing the
numerical relations between the various religious groups was played by the
government. Poor relief played an especially important role here. There has
been no consistent research into
religious practices during the Dutch Republic. An inventory by the
synod of the former public church in 1829 made clear that, apart from
Friesland and Groningen in the North, about 40% of its nominal members had
become full members, with the south almost reaching 50%. In Groningen and
Friesland, however, no more
than one in six of the nominal members was a full member. These differences
had to do with the practice of poor relief.
If we look at Amsterdam, with its 200.000
inhabitants around 1800 the only big city of the Netherlands, we find that of the 60% of the
population belonging to the public church, some 40% (some 48,000 people) were full members; in effect,
most adult males and females. They were served by 30 ministers, who
preached in eleven churches, and who were assisted by some junior clergy.
We know that there were some 1660 services a year held in Amsterdam, on Sundays and weekdays. If
the level of church attendance around 1800 was the same as in the 1950s,
when 60% of all adult members of the former public church attended church
at least twice a month, each service ought to have attracted 520 people.
This seems highly unlikely, as we know that several ministers were very
unpopular and drew only small numbers of attendants.The general level of
religious practice was probably much lower than in the 1950s. An inventory undertaken by the
church council of conventicles in 1778 turned up almost nothing. There was
a subculture of highly pious people, as is clear from autobiographical
notes and diaries, and the
lists of hiring of seats in churches. Some individuals hired seats in four
or more churches, so as to be able to follow a favourite preacher from
church to church.
The probably rather low levels of attendance during the ancien
rgime were not considered a problem. The public
church of the Republic had no sense of an urgent need to be reaching out to
the unchurched masses. Most living movements within the church were more
concerned with raising standards and setting themselves apart from the
merely baptised people, and had thus more to do with keeping people out
than with bringing them in. This stress on forming a pure community was in
line with the traditions of the church, and was only combated when
separatist traditions emerged. The most striking aspect of this absence of
a missionary endeavour in the modern sense is a total lack of statistical
awareness. The public church did not count its members, not at any level of
its organization. The National Assembly of the young Batavian Republic did not know whether
Catholics would perhaps not form a majority, when the people living in the
areas south of the great rivers became full citizens of the nation.
3.2
The emergence of the modern nation state changed all this. The
Protestant churches became deeply involved with teaching and shaping the
citizens of the nation. A general interest in pedagogy emerged, focusing on
the need to present messages in such a way that they could be understood.
Most of the religious changes taking place in the years around 1800 in
matters of preaching, singing, and organizing catechism can be understood
as springing from such a pedagogical awareness. The former public church
engaged in a relentless catechetical effort, but also placed a new emphasis
on the family as the place where religious instruction ought to take place,
as evidenced by a spate of housebooks. In the interest of pedagogy,
discussions and polemics within sermons and the catechism were completely
wiped out. Lecturing in a simple, civilised way was seen as the best way to
inculcate religious belief. Preaching and singing ought to take place in
fairly decorous way. The new stress on understanding thus resulted in a
cultural change. The enormous stress on understanding and knowledge even
resulted in a certain domestication of Dutch Catholics and their piety.
They gave up those religious activities, like venerating the sacrament or
memorial masses, which did not have a pedagogical dimension.
The secessionists of New Dissent were very
successful in spreading their message, reaching levels of growth of which
the British Methodists would not have been ashamed. The main way in which
they spread their message was by means of word of mouth propaganda, with
familial and trade networks as the main channels of missionary activity.
The churches of New Dissent seem to have tapped a largely oral culture of
popular mysticism, in which experiences of election and reprobation, and
more extravagant visions of the Devil and other supernatural beings were
mixed. In the course of the 18th century various pietistic movements had
introduced the notion that the individual piety of ministers ought and could be judged by the
pious among his congregation. This oppositional stance was now overlaid
with a claim to possess a knowledge which the ministry of the former public
church had lost. It is clear that the opposition focused to an important
extent precisely upon the cultural style of the protestant establishment.
The members of New Dissent rejected the new evangelical songs, printed
books in old-fashioned and hard to read Gothic letters, and loved to use
biblical expressions such as those about whoring after strange Gods which
the ministers of the public church passed over out of cultural distaste.
This opposition to the cultural pretentions of the Protestant elite was
very succesful, but the emergence of New Dissent also involved a kind of
continuous domestication of this popular culture, as the establishment of a
regular minstry drove out the more subjective aspects of this kind of
religion. The churches of New Dissent were not very stable, with a
remarkable number of secessions and disruptions. Numerical growth took
place almost completely on their unorganized fringe. Well-established
dissenting congregations did not grow anymore. The growth of New Dissent was thus a very long-term and drawn-out
process, continuing almost to the present, although now
institutionalization seems to have caught up with the whole of this culture
at last and its growth has ended.
3.3 From the 1870s onwards, formal
organizations and a vibrant press became much more important in reaching
people. Organizations and mass-media were necessary to create the
nation-wide communities which contested the unity of the Protestant nation.
A period in which these communities were created, roughly from the 1870s
till 1920, the same years in which the census gradually was widened, was
followed by a period in which the pillars were very powerful and relations
between the various groups hardly changed. During the whole century, religion was the most
important part of peoples social identity. The social importance of
religion made the Netherlands exceptional in two ways.
The first exceptional characteristic was
the relative early and fast growth of people who openly claimed not to
belong to any church. They grew from 0,3% in the census of 1879 to 14,3% in
1930. Then their numbers more or less stabilized, reaching 18,3% in 1960.
Attempts to explain the emergence of this group economically run into the same
kind of problems that the emergence of orthodox Protestantism as a social
movement presents. There is a marked geographical differentiation. In some
areas even in the 1960s almost the entire population belonged to a church,
whereas in other areas already around 1920 more than half of the people had
left it. There is no very clear correlation with economic factors, for
instance with either heavy industry or rural poverty. There are very
important correlations with the growth of early socialism and a general
left-wing orientation. In certain districts
in Friesland at the end of the 19th century, the percentage of people
claiming not to belong to a church showed marked variations from census to
census, declining or growing in line with the political battles between
left and right. It is probably best to state that, just as orthodox
Protestants and Catholics used religion to mobilize their supporters
against the liberal hegemony, the
Socialist mobilization could not escape having religious
implications as well, especially among its rank and file.
The second exceptional characteristic of
the Netherlands in the 20th century was the high level of religious
practice among church members. In the early 1960s, the Dutch were probably
the most churchgoing of European peoples. Of the more than 80% of the
population which belonged to a church, almost three quarters would attend
service on at least one, but more commonly several Sundays a month. The
strictest churches, the Roman-Catholics and the neo-Calvinist protestants
(the Gereformeerde Kerken) who together counted
almost half of the Dutch population as their members, attained figures
of attendance of close to 90%.
This last characteristic has disappeared, as
religious practices have plummeted over the last twenty years. The other
characteristic has become even more pronounced, as the Netherlands at
present must be the country with the largest number of people who declare
that they do not belong to a church. In the latest opinion-poll, in 1991, a
staggering 58% of the
population older than seventeen stated to be religiously unaffiliated.
Whereas till the 1970s the growth of the percentage of people not belonging
to a church had almost completely been at the expense of the former public
church, during the last
twenty-five years the neo-Calvinists and, especially, the Catholics have
been losing members as well. In 1970, 19% of those who had been raised
Catholic stated not to belong to any church. In 1991 this had jumped to
48%. For the neo-Calvinists,
the comparative numbers are 19% and 30% . Religion in the Netherlands had become almost completely
identified with the membership of particular social groups. These groups no
longer exist, and as the churches and organized religion have found it
extremely hard to escape from the social definition of religion which was
in force during most of the 20th century, religious allegiance has declined
at a stupefying rate.
4. Conclusion
The Netherlands seem to fit Hugh McLeods
interpretation of the modern history of religion in Western Europe as an
extreme case. In his Religion and the People of Western Europe , McLeod stated that as 19th century Christianity lost its
overarching character and religion ceased to provide a focus of social
unity, the churches both gained and lost. Large numbers were alienated from
the official church, but religion also became a major basis for the
distinctive identity of specific communities, classes, and factions within
a divided society. McLeod considered three periods crucial for this
involvement of religion with modern social conflict: the years around 1800,
with the impact of the French Revolution, the 1870s and 1880s, with the
emergence of modern industrial and mass-political strife, and the 1950s and
1960s, when these conflicts slowly abated and traditional communal
loyalities were dissolved.
The religious development of the
Netherlands fits this chronology rather nicely. But whereas McLeod
characterizes the conflicts of the period around 1800 as being about
religion itself, and those of the 1870s and 1880s as being the result of
social and economic changes, that resulted in conflicts in which religion
could not avoid taking sides, in the Netherlands the first period did not
result in religious conflict and the conflicts in the second period seem to
have pitted religious groups against a cultural and political elite.
One could, perhaps, argue that the
vicissitudes of all religions in the modern world rest upon the relation
between two fundamental political shifts which take place in all
modernizing polities. The first is the emergence of the modern
nation-state, with its governemental claim to reach all its citizens
directly and its nationalist program to create a moral community of free,
equal and related citizens. The program of the modern nation-state can lead
to clashes with religious establishments, when these are closely allied
with a traditional political
and social order, but the nationalist program need not involve a conflict
with religion as such. The modern states creation of the citizen can be
religiously legitimated by various kinds of religious nationalism. At the
end of the eighteenth century, both in the Netherlands and the United
States political revolutions were supported by former protestant state
churches, which henceforth located religion in the inner selves of the
citizens of the nation.
The second major political event with which
religion has to contend is the emergence of modern mass-politics, meaning
the involvement of the common people within the political process. In the
United States only a generation separated the new social location of
religion in the inner self of the citizens of the nation from the emergence
of modern mass politics. In these same years, important sections of
American Protestantism started to distinguish sharply between education and
conversion. These groups did not consider it necessary to create the moral
self of the citizens of the nation by means of education. This close link
with a specific representation of democratic citizenship seems to have furnished American
Christianity with its peculiar flexibility and freedom of tradition. In
America the introduction of modern mass-politics led to a new conception of
the way in which religion shapes inner selves, stressing conversion in
favour of education. In the Netherlands, the cultural class-formation which
was the consequence of the religious practices of the new nation-state made
a much deeper impression, because almost three generations passed before it
was challenged by the emergence of modern mass-politics. When it finally
emerged, modern mass-politics was based upon the formation of separate
religious communities which attacked an hegemonic religious nationalism by
claiming to possess their own kind of knowledge. Religion was not involved
with conflicts of another nature, either social or economic, but supplied
the identity upon which to found factional communities.
Comparing the Dutch
development to the religious history of other European countries, one is
struck by the way in which the introduction of the nationalist program and
the emergence of modern mass-politics in the Netherlands were abrupt
happenings, neatly separated, taking place within one generation, and being
generally accepted. I am tempted to relate the suddennes of these shifts
and the swiftly emerging consensus to a peculiar political style. Since the
Revolt of the 16th century, the exercise of political power in the
Netherlands has been based upon moral influence and the reaching of
consensus. In an economically well-integrated, heavily urbanized society,
mainly consisting of small towns, such a political style has led to a very
conformist culture.
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